What is antinomianism?

Question 7082.

The antinomian error is the conviction, held openly or lived out quietly, that because a Christian is under grace, God’s moral commands no longer have any claim on him. The word is built from two Greek pieces meaning against law, and it names the opposite ditch from legalism on the same narrow road.

Paul met it in his own lifetime, which is oddly reassuring. If the apostle who wrote Romans was accused of encouraging sin, then any preacher who teaches grace clearly will occasionally be misheard in the same way. Let me set out what the antinomian error claims, how Scripture answers it, and the subtler forms it takes in respectable churches.

The shape of the claim

In its blunt form the argument runs like this. Salvation is by grace alone, entirely apart from works. My sins past, present and future are covered. Therefore my conduct is a matter of indifference to God, and any preaching that presses obedience on me is a return to bondage.

Every premise in that chain is orthodox until the therefore. Grace really is free, the cross really does cover future sin, and works really contribute nothing to justification. The antinomian error is not a false start; it is a true start with a catastrophic conclusion attached.

The Greek word for lawlessness, anomia, is used in the New Testament for precisely this condition, and it is never neutral. John defines sin as lawlessness, and Jesus tells those He never knew to depart from Him as workers of it.

Paul anticipates the objection

Having spent five chapters establishing justification by faith apart from works, Paul opens chapter six by voicing the antinomian error himself. Romans 6:1 and 2: what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it?

Notice the form of his answer. He does not retreat from grace, add a condition, or reintroduce law as the ground of acceptance. He appeals to what has happened to the believer. You died. You were buried with Him and raised with Him. Living in sin is not forbidden so much as incoherent, like a freed slave applying for readmission to the plantation.

That is the New Testament’s characteristic answer to the antinomian error, and it is worth learning, because it explains why grace produces holiness rather than undermining it. Grace does not lower the wall; it changes the prisoner.

Grace as a teacher

Titus 2:11 and 12 is the verse I most want antinomians to sit with. The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self controlled, upright and godly lives.

Grace trains. That is the assertion. Grace is not a legal fiction that leaves the person untouched while altering their status; it comes with a curriculum. Anybody who claims grace and shows no evidence of that training has grounds to ask what exactly they have received.

John says something similar in 1 John 3:9. Whoever has been born of God does not keep on sinning, because God’s seed abides in him. He is not describing perfection but a changed nature that cannot settle comfortably into what it once loved.

Where the antinomian error hides

Very few evangelicals will state the position openly. It shows up instead in practice, and the forms are worth naming. There is the believer who treats a particular sin as permanently exempt, having decided that this is simply how he is made. There is the church that will not exercise discipline because grace supposedly forbids it, though Paul plainly did in Corinth.

There is the preaching that has become so anxious about legalism that imperatives have quietly disappeared from the pulpit, leaving a congregation that knows a great deal about acceptance and nothing about obedience. I have heard whole sermon series where the word repent never appeared, and the antinomian error does not need to be taught to be absorbed.

And there is the most common form of all, which is not theological at all: the assumption that because forgiveness is available afterwards, the sin in front of me is affordable. That is a transaction with grace, and Paul calls it presuming on God’s kindness.

Why it is not the answer to legalism

People often arrive at the antinomian error by reaction. They have come out of a controlling church, or a childhood of religious rules, and the relief of discovering grace is so great that any restraint feels like a return to the cage. I have genuine sympathy with that, and I would not rush such a person.

But the cure for a broken leg is not a broken arm. Both legalism and antinomianism make the same fundamental mistake, which is to treat law and grace as competitors for the same job. Law was never given to justify. Grace was never given to license. Get the functions right and the false choice dissolves.

I have set the relationship out fully in the article on law and grace, and the related question of cheap grace and costly grace covers the same territory from another angle.

What the believer is actually under

Christians are not under the Mosaic covenant as a rule of life, and I hold that position firmly. But not under law does not mean not under obligation. The New Testament gives the believer more than a thousand commands, calls them the law of Christ, and expects obedience from love rather than fear.

The motive has changed entirely, and that is the point the antinomian error misses. A man who obeys to secure acceptance is a hireling. A man who obeys because he has been accepted is a son. Same actions, entirely different religion, and only the second is sustainable.

Jesus said it as plainly as it can be said. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. Not in order to be loved. Because you are. See also the question of why Christians still sin after being saved, which is a different problem from antinomianism and often confused with it.

Luther, Agricola and the original quarrel

The word antinomian was coined in the sixteenth century, and it is worth knowing the story. Johann Agricola argued that the law had no place at all in the Christian’s life, not even to convict of sin, since the gospel alone should do that work. Luther, who had spent his life insisting that we are justified apart from works, coined the term against him.

That detail is instructive. The man most famous for preaching grace was the first to name the antinomian error, and he did it precisely because he understood what grace was for. Luther preached the law to convict and the gospel to save, and he thought removing the first left nothing for the second to do.

So this is not an argument between people who love grace and people who love rules. It is an argument within the household of grace about what grace produces, and the historic Protestant answer has always been that it produces obedience.

The heart of the antinomian error

Underneath the theology there is usually a defective view of sin. If sin is understood mainly as breaking a rule, then removing the rule removes the problem, and the antinomian conclusion follows logically. If sin is understood as Scripture presents it, as offence against a person and damage to a relationship, then no removal of statute makes it harmless.

Think of it in ordinary terms. A husband does not refrain from betraying his wife because a law forbids it. He refrains because of who she is to him and what betrayal would do to them both. Remove the law entirely and nothing changes for a man who loves his wife, which is exactly Paul’s point about the believer and God.

That is why the antinomian error is finally a failure of love rather than a failure of doctrine. A person who has understood what the cross cost does not go looking for the boundary of what grace will tolerate, because the question itself has become distasteful.

How to preach grace without producing it

Since I preach grace deliberately and often, I have had to think about how to do it without inviting the antinomian error. Three habits have helped. I preach the indicative before the imperative, so that people know who they are before they are told what to do. I keep the cross in view when pressing obedience, so that the demand always arrives attached to the provision.

And I try never to leave sin unnamed. Grace preached in the abstract, with no particular sin identified, becomes a mood rather than a message, and a congregation that hears about forgiveness without hearing about what is being forgiven will drift towards the antinomian assumption without ever adopting it consciously.

Paul managed both in the same letters. Romans has the most thorough exposition of justification in Scripture and also the most detailed instruction on how to treat weaker brothers, pay taxes and refuse revenge. He saw no tension, and neither should we.

So, now what?

Do a piece of honest inventory. Is there a sin in your life that you have stopped fighting, having concluded that grace covers it and that resistance is pointless? That is the antinomian error operating in the one place it does most damage, which is not the seminary but the private life.

Bring it into the light, tell somebody, and start fighting again, not to earn a standing you already have but because you have been raised with Jesus and this thing does not belong to your new life. Grace is not a ceiling under which you may live as you please. It is a power that trains. What is it currently training you out of?

What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? (Romans 6:1-2)